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Salesforce claims 'record' quarter record at Oracle and SAP's expense

More Salesforce on more AWS promise

Salesforce has claimed its “best ever” year opening - at the expense of Oracle and SAP - while committing a growing portion of its cloud to AWS.

The SaaS provider bounced back into the black for the first three months of 2016, its fiscal 2017, reporting net income of $38m.

Revenue was up 26.8 per cent to $1.91bn, leaving Salesforce with an EPS of $0.06 versus $0.01 for the prior year.

Profit came after three successive months in 2015 – Salesforce’s fiscal 2016 – of loss.

The first three months of the firm's fiscal year to end of April has become a period when Salesforce manages to actually turn a profit. Ahead of last year’s red run, Salesforce reported $4m income in that period.

Salesforce is thriving because - according to chief executive Marc Benioff - Oracle and SAP are doing so badly when it comes to cloud.

He told investors: “They just have not been able to make that transformation that we’ve made, that other companies have made, and we just continue to take market share from them and gain customers at a record levels and you can see that their growth numbers are nothing like we’re putting up here.”

Buoyed by fortune, Salesforce upped its ante for the full year results to making between $8.16bn and $8.20bn, an increase of between 22 and 23 per cent.

The firm has targeted $10bn revenue as its next big fiscal goal.

While the past has been built firmly on Salesforce’s Oracle-rooted Force.com platform, hitting and exceeding that goal will take the AWS cloud platform.

Salesforce recently revealed its Internet of Things Cloud would run on AWS, via Heroku – the AWS platform-as-a-service it purchased in 2010.

Probed by one Wall Streeter on Salesforce’s use of AWS, chief operating officer Keith Block said Salesforce is “exploring ways” to use AWS more aggressively.”

“I think you continue to see more announcements between Salesforce and Amazon and you will see our partnership and strategic alliance with them continue to grow and develop,” he said. ®